-7th GIFF-
DEZO HOFFMANN - PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE BEATLES
Feature Film Directors: Laura Sivakova-Passova, Patrik Lancaric Greek Premiere Dezo Hoffmann, a legendary photographer of the Beatles, was born in Slovakia in 1912. He lived most of his life in the UK, while his photographs conquered the world; yet he died almost forgotten. He captured the horrors of multiple war fronts and later laid the foundations of modern pop photography. Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles - are just a few of the stars who had stood in front of his lens. We want to tell his story like nobody could’ve imagined it.
What is Left of Us
Feature Film Director: Diego Borges A man finds himself in the presence of the Devil, who drags him into hell where others share his torments. One speaks about the vicious pendulum of shame and wounded pride, but his voice is quiet and meaningless in their last hour.
NOSTALGIE
Short Film Director: Kathryn Ferguson Greek Premiere Drew Lord Haig, a washed-up '80s one-hit-wonder turned IT entrepreneur, is stunned when a Belfast battalion invites him to perform at their centenary celebration. Flattered and intrigued, Drew accepts, hoping to relive his glory days and recapture his youth. Launching into his hit single, the audience appear unmoved. But on the opening bars of his long forgotten b-side the brooding, nihilistic Nostalgie de la Boue, something unexpected happens: the crowd erupts. Word for word, they sing with fervor, elevating the moment into something transcendent. Drew is overwhelmed, until, at the bar afterward, he learns the truth: the battalion had adopted his song during the Troubles, using it as a rallying cry for covert, brutal operations. What he once saw as artistic rebellion had become a weapon, a soundtrack to bloodshed. Reeling, Drew returns home, the weight of complicity pressing down. What began as nostalgic curiosity ends in moral reckoning. His music, once his escape, now binds him to a history he never meant to write.
IGNITION
Mid-Length Film Director: Andrei Turcan A young man tries to escape his dark past and finds himself confronted with a live changing choice.
RISE
Short Film Director: Jessica J. Rowlands A charismatic young boy who lives on a rubbish dump in Zimbabwe must convince a reclusive boxing coach to teach him to fight to find safety and strength in a world that has left him behind.
BORN IN TO YOU
Dance Video Director: Emma Evelein Greek Premiere Born into You is a poetic short film exploring the essence of belonging and human connection. Set in an industrial world, two contrasting, newly born beings meet and form a deep, spiritual bond. Through expressive choreography and design, their evolving relationship, marked by vulnerability, trust, and growth, unfolds into emotional and physical maturity. The film’s abstract visuals and movement celebrate how closeness and trust allow us to discover ourselves and truly belong.
DUTPA
Short Film Director: Tashi Dawa, Tsering Angdus In the windswept silence of the Himalayas, an elderly woman named Amma lives a life defined by a singular, obsessive compulsion: she ties intricate knots on everything she touches. From bags of grain to the ropes of her livestock, these knots serve as a desperate anchor to a past that is rapidly slipping away. Every day, Amma maintains a silent vigil at the local bus stop, watching passengers depart for lives she can no longer reach. As she waits for a homecoming that never arrives, memories of her son and his family—who migrated to the city years ago—begin to bleed into her stark reality. As the line between memory and isolation blurs, Amma’s meticulous knots become frantic and erratic. Dutpa (The Knot) is a haunting meditation on abandonment and the invisible toll of urban migration, capturing the silent tragedy of those left behind in the wake of progress.
IT'LL MAKE A MAN OF YOU
Short Film Director: Adam Lowry When he is drafted into war, a pacifist young man must defy his father's authority and family legacy or betray everything he believes in.
VOLTA
Short Film Director: Socrates Dimitrios Mousmoulidis Artemis finds out that her application for a university in New York has been accepted. As she prepares to leave, her parents organize a big farewell party at their house. In a crowd full of guests Artemis finds Simos. He proposes to flee the party in order to have a last excursion together. A long journey commences, filled with nature, sea and secluded landscapes. Present, past and future meet for a hike only to decipher the answers for some unresolved questions. What is love? When do we fall in love? What is what makes us fall in love with someone? How do we stop loving someone? Where do all those beautiful sentiments end up to? Who is the culprit when two people must break up, but they don’t want to? A series of questions that will never be addressed and perhaps might never be answered. A starry-eyed story about feelings and their decay throughout time, as well as the heartache we experience when we have to move on and leave behind traces of something that once only mattered.
Gumboro
Short Film Director: Dimitris Vavatsis Michalis moves out for the first time. His new place — a small apartment in downtown Athens — looks ideal. Until the storage room door won’t open. Set in the heart of a city that hides more than it reveals, the film builds a claustrophobic, psychological coming-of-age thriller. A mother who never truly steps back, a door that refuses to stay shut, and a series of existential flutters that slowly take on a menacing shape.
BITTER HONEY
Short Film Director: Kostas Moutsoulas European Premiere After his father’s death, Alex returns home and must choose between staying to care for his mentally ill brother or going back to his life overseas.
CHANGE MAKERS
Short Film Director: Casey Beck Lefteris Arapakis was born to be a 6th generation fisherman in Greece. Instead, he started the country’s first-ever fishing school, training fishermen to remove plastic garbage from local waters and convincing this ancient profession – including his own family – of the need to protect the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. Lefteris is the first of six young climate activists, our Change Makers, to be featured in a docuseries of the same name. Together, they are tackling the biggest issue of our time – the race against climate catastrophe – as they transform their individual communities and inspire people with their innovation, persistence, and grace.
FLOATING LANDS
Short Film Director: Christos Voutsas ‘Floating Lands’ imagines an evacuation from the volcanic island of Nisyros using pumice stones from the nearby quarry island of Yali as floating islands. The speculative scenario unfolds during a moment of crisis, the brink of an eruption, when local workers turn to the floating rocks, they once extracted to help them escape across the sea. The video follows the intimate journey of people and stones as they enter a symbiotic relationship forged through myth, migration and material memory. Drawing on geological, geopolitical, economic, and historical research, the installation navigates multiple timescales—from deep geological time to late industrialization. Through this layered fiction, it invites reflection on the interdependence between human and mineral, asking: who builds land, who moves across it, and what new ecologies of care and resilience might emerge when safety is found not in solidity, but in drift.
JUST BEING NICE
Short Film Director: Jeronimo Geldart Late at night, a woman stops at an almost empty gas station. What begins as a brief, ordinary interaction slowly turns unsettling as a man’s presence reshapes the space. Through silence, proximity, and small gestures, Just Being Nice explores how behavior often framed as harmless can become threatening, revealing how fear can emerge without explicit violence, simply through presence.
VOLVER / RETURNING
Short Film Director: Catherine Mazoyer World Premiere Sol (46), a talented actress who sacrificed her career for motherhood, now lives in anonymity as a beach waitress. Burdened by debts and the resentment of her teenage daughter, Martina, Sol is labeled as "mediocre" for living off past memories. A painful awakening forces her to realize that her daughter needs to see her fulfilled and happy. Defying time and fear, Sol must make a decision: to remain as she is or to return to being who she once was.
Reading Between the Lines
Short Film Director: Jochen Rall What feelings, thaugths and stories can hide the strangers we run into every day ? In a tramway, the passengers are very close from each other, but don't want to meet. During a trip, the newspaper begin to communicate, their content start to change and interact...
THE VEIL
Short Film Director: Fintan Kearney A street artist struggles to stay composed when a passerby loudly
The Game of Solidarity. AEK- PARTIZAN 1999
Short Film Director: Ismini Sakellaropoulou This 15-minute documentary recounts the moving journey of AEK Athens Football Club, which, amid the NATO bombings of April 1999, traveled to Belgrade to play a friendly match against Partizan — sending a powerful global message of peace, solidarity, and human dignity. Through rare archival footage, testimonies, and dramatized reenactments, the film pays tribute to the spirit of sports that unites people beyond borders.
SANTA CATALINA
Short Film Director: Alexander Alexandrov In a near-future, a brief AI-tech outage becomes a rare window for a grandfather and granddaughter to slip away from the noise and sail to a quiet island. As the world’s machines fall silent, they reconnect with the simple joys of life and the natural world, each seeing it through their own generation’s eyes. On the island, surrounded by others seeking quiet and connection, they explore, laugh, and share stories, rediscovering what it means to truly live in the moment before the grid comes back on.
DARKLY BRIGHT
Short Film Director: Doug Rollins World Premiere When Henry uses his recent inheritance to visit Athens and the Greek coast, a chance meeting with a captivating and mysterious stranger develops into an obsession with dangerous consequences.
KNOCKOFFS
Series Director: Asaad Abbud For the sake of his reckless older brother, Nikita enters underground cage fights, battling brutes in illegal arenas. He seems just a step away from saving Borya from prison-until Nikita learns his brother has been playing a double game.
THE SOUND OF BLUE
Dance Video Director: Bruno Rodriguez Bazante The Sound of Blue tells the story of a dancer who, after losing her hearing, tries to listen through the memory of sound itself.
STUHI
Music Video Director: Chiara Feriani European Premiere Everyone remembers the hollow left behind by the disappearance of human life. The melancholy—and the need—for everyday urban chaos. The frantic movements, the endless lines, the absurd traffic that, once gone, ended up magnifying an entire chapter of our history. It was a time when truth shrank into moments of stillness, slipping easily into the possibility of being false. A time when truths—and the debates built around them—had to be kept intact, even when their fragility was obvious. That same tension lingers in the road lines that open the film: directions without destinations, paths that lead nowhere. It grows stronger in the elegiac soundtrack that frames a vertical cityscape, where oversized statues stand as the only living witnesses of a frozen public space. Two figures step into this setting. They move forward carrying the weight of uncertainty—born from the emptiness below them and the edges that hold them up. Against the void, against the illusion, they run, nameless and unseen. And yet they reach another place, where they finally emerge—descending into the underground of a crowd that seems, somehow, to have been waiting for them…
Last Breath
Dance Video Director: Tania Christina Gentidou World Premiere We follow a dancer in an underwater world. What initially appears as a fragile symbiosis of movement and material gradually turns into a suffocating struggle. The plastic bag coils around her body, depriving her of air. In this dance, the dancer fights for breath, control, and life.
ISA ORTEGA
Music Video Director: Ignacio Garcia European premiere As she rides on a bumpy New York taxi, Isa Ortega overcomes the pain of a lost love through self healing and reflection. Her internal exploration gives her the tools to let go of an ex-boyfriend who she candidly remembers but knows will never work.
INK DANCE
Dance Video Director: Zed Xu Ink Dance 墨之舞 is a dance film by Zed Xu about inner child healing. A tender story on one’s inner journey featuring New Zealand Chinese dance artists Heidi Chen and Chloe Li. Original score by Jefferson Chen (Goodspace), cinematography by Jackson Doudney, production design and still images by Karen Ishiguro, costume design by Sophelia Shizune.
SIDDHARTA - IN THE SKY
Music Video Director: Ven Jemersic The music video speaks about relationships - ones that begin with a spark, continue in silence, and often fall apart because of misunderstanding. I wanted to highlight how, in relationships, we often think too quickly, feel too slowly, and communicate too little. How, at times, we fail to distinguish play from seriousness. And how thin the line can be between courtship and conflict. Yet if anything can mend what is broken, it is love. The video was filmed with a special camera that captures the invisible part of the infrared spectrum, adding a dreamlike quality to the story and placing it in a timeless, spaceless dimension.
PALIA AGAPI / ANOTHER LOVE
Music Video Director: Tereza Kazitori The song “Palia Agapi” is a Greek cover of the well-known Another Love by Tom Odell. The song has been adapted in lyrics, maintaining the theme of the original but in a more poetic version, while the music has been added with touches reminiscent of another era. The musical version of the song is inextricably linked to the video clip that accompanies it.
ZESI
Dance Video Director: Panagiotis Papafragkos Two women share the same house, the same everyday routines — yet not the same world. Each presence mirrors the other, and still, an invisible distance lies between them: a silence that cannot be bridged. The intimacy of home slowly turns into a labyrinth of solitude, where every movement, every glance, carries the weight of what remains unspoken. Gradually, the shadows of their inner lives spill into the space, transforming coexistence into a stage of relentless waiting. From confinement to absolute light, truth seeks a passage outward, but words are never enough; only the body remains, beating like a drum within the silence. Our bodies are cauldrons at boil. Zesi means the seethe — the very act of boiling. That is the title.
WHAT BINDS US
Dance Video Director: Damien Bourletsis European Premiere What if, within the breath of one body, the echo of another was already resonating? In a vital surge where every movement becomes a cry, nine dancers unveil their inner struggle across shifting landscapes: sea, cliff, city, dance studio, ancient theatre. Nine singular territories. Each surrenders to raw improvisation — a moment of questioning rooted in their intimate space — where movement becomes the language of urgency: to be, to resist, to exist. Bodies answer, intertwine, and merge in an organic continuity, weaving bridges between their solitary battles. Living echoes of an invisible geometry, uniting bodies beyond forms and boundaries. What if what seemed isolated was already part of a vaster, elusive movement?
HEARTREAKER
Music Video Director: Jagger Waters Music video created for LA based artist Hyland Church, created, directed & produced by Jagger Waters.
SPECULUM
Dance Video Director: Yannos Polychroniadis They say that life is based on the complexity of simple things coexisting, but what seems simple is often the opposite. We live time as a linear thing conducting our existences, but what happens when we realize that what we perceive might be twisted? What would I say to another me if we met at the same exact moment? What would be too late to say? And what if we met in the same moment but at different ages, like in life and death?
HALFWAY GAME
Feature Screenplay Screenwriter: Peter Herlan Playing United Airlines’ "Halfway to Hawaii Game" lands an executive in a series of hilarious breakups on the islands, but it takes the wisdom of a musically gifted friend to help him finally see past the rainbows and pineapples in order to find true love.
GRACE
Feature Screenplay Screenwriter: Stephen Dest Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Grace Cooper returns home after an unexpected loss and finds herself back in the orbit of her estranged father, a world-renowned architect, where unfinished conversations linger and reconciliation feels just out of reach.
AMERICANA
Feature Screenplay Screenwriter: Dale Wolf In an America trying to rebuild after a supervillain’s presidency, two superheroes must stop domestic terrorists.
LUCKY
Short Screenplay Screenwriter: Tom E. Nicholson My dad died. A few weeks later, my house burned down. Now, as I sift through the ashes of my life, my sitcom gets unexpectedly greenlit. I’ve got one shot to find the funny — the absurdity and the healing power of laughter — or blow my only chance at Hollywood success.
ATALANTA
Short Screenplay Screenwriter: Arthur Ericsson In a kingdom where love is wagered on a footrace and failure means death, the unbeatable Atalanta faces a suitor who tries to win not by speed, but by awakening her wonder for the world.
TIGGLES, MUMMY & ME
Short Screenplay Screenwriter: Jill Thrussell Tiggles, Mummy & Me: Our Journey to Safety follows the journey of Anastasia and her cat Tiggles told through her diary entries as they live and hide away together in their home due to domestic violence then move into a refuge (safe house) where they no longer have to hide from danger anymore.
THE COMING STORM
Theatrical Play Author: Stephan Morrow In 30's Berlin the Nazi's are taking over and a respected, non-Aryan professor is ejected from the University and then saved from some Nazi thugs by his protege Anton Eisenbruck - a brilliant German physicist who has won the Nobel Prize at 23 ( based on Werner Heisenberg).
THE ENGINE OF OUR DISRUPTION
Theatrical Play Author: Patricia Milton A Chief Ethics Officer is placed in charge of Responsible Artificial Intelligence. Surrounded by unethical colleagues (and her mother, a morally oblivious Senator), she must decide whether or not to destroy her career by bringing down her Big Tech firm.
